Bookslut

September 2004

My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel

Pedro Lemebel's My Tender Matador is both playful and profound, harsh
and delicate, a story of characters, of people, and yet a novel of ideas. It is
a near-masterpiece.

The novel centers around The Queen of The Corner, a faded, fey forty-something
in Santiago, Chile. She isn't a woman, far from it, but occupies a clear, specific
gender role in a macho culture: effeminate homosexual man. In 1986 Santiago
is volatile, the streets a battleground where violent paramilitaries seek to
eradicate the spreading populist opposition to Augusto Pinochet's brutal military
dictatorship. The Queen, however, is indifferent to politics. Her radio isn't
tuned to the government's propaganda station nor the student-run pirate broadcast;
she listens exclusively to syrupy pop love songs. She is doing better for herself
than she ever has, and makes enough money embroidering for the city's elite
to afford her own apartment in a poor neighborhood. Her relative complacency
is disrupted by Carlos, a handsome young revolutionary who may or may not be
using the Queen and her apartment for selfish means, something she may or may
not be able to admit to herself. The result is a tender, sophisticated love
story.

Nothing written about the quality of Lemebel's prose can bring the point across;
one must, and should, read it for oneself. He is a writer of stunning lyrical
gifts, a jaw-dropping analogist distinguished further by how well the cascade
of luminous, unforced metaphors and similes serves the text, carrying it forward
instead of slowing it down. His virtuosity is so expertly directed as to appear
effortless, advancing the story, never calling attention to itself. Rich with
colors and shapes, vivid, confident, this is the work of a master. The only
distraction will be your own astonishment, the number of times you will blink,
murmur "Holy shit," and be compelled to nudge awake, call downstairs
to, or telephone a fellow lover of language to share aloud a given example of
descriptive craftsmanship.

The narration moves easily between characters, dipping lightly into the vernacular
of each, never straying long from the protagonist whose story it is. The dialogue
is natural and yet so carefully contextualized that no quotation marks or attributive
verbs are needed to demarcate it or differentiate speakers. Katherine Silver
is to be commended for a nuanced, flexible translation that carries Lemebel's
sly double-entendres smoothly into English, preserving both his elegance and
grit. It's a translation that chooses well when to employ "faggot"
or "sissy" but knows when only an italicized "Maricón!"
will do.

Lemebel is a dangerous writer. Augusto Pinochet appears in My Tender Matador,
first as an ominous political presence, then as someone glimpsed from a distance,
and eventually as a fully realized human being, an angry man in a bad marriage.
Lemebel even gives us the notorious tyrant's dysfunctional childhood, a hilarious
and merciless work of imagination, merciless because Lemebel coerces us into
sympathy with a monster. It is a gambit reminiscent of Yury Dombrovsky's subtle,
cataclysmic The Faculty of Useless Knowledge, in which Dombrovsky brings
home Stalin's purges in the cruelest way possible, by forcing the reader to
scrutinize and even understand the petty officials and officers who carried
the purges out. Humanizing and trivializing Pinochet, refusing to mythologize
him and approaching him as simply another character is an outrageous, nearly
inconceivable kindness to a figure who deserves none, and a powerful answer
to evil. It's risky, audacious, and its success as both a literary tactic and
a political gesture is a measure of the novel's gravity.

While the hallmark of both Lemebel's writing and his protagonist's conduct
is poignant, exquisite restraint, My Tender Matador does stoop once
to self-indulgence. There is a single swipe at an operosely overpraised literary
lion, a passing cut so deft and deep that when Lemebel's pen left the paper
at the passage's conclusion the target must have felt it, must have clutched
his chest in phantom pain.

It would be reductive and simplistic to call the Queen self-hating, but her
actions play out that way, and her sexual fatalism may alienate some readers.
It isn't that she doesn't feel she deserves happiness, rather that she seeks
happiness in the bittersweet of heartbreak and prefers idealized, unrequited
love to the risks of the real thing. This addiction to fantasy is understandable
given what we learn of the Queen's life, but when love finally comes her way,
her steadfast repudiation of it isn't just perverse, it's obnoxious. The Queen
is wedded to the pose she's adopted, so fixated on the role of doomed, pining
lover that she can't accept or acknowledge that the object of her affection
loves her back. This clinging to romantic delusion is endearing for much of
the book, but by the novel's end has ceased to be anything except a crippling,
destructive pathology that frustrates the happiness of both the main characters
and the reader rooting for them. Censuring a book for failing to reward the
protagonist embarrasses only the critic -- Lemebel may feel he has written a
happy ending, and others may agree -- but in a tale where the personal is so
intertwined with the political, the negation of not just love but even its possibility
seems toxic.

Maintaining the dubious tack of berating an awesome novel for its departures
from the reviewer's politics, My Tender Matador's most serious disappointment
is the character of Pinochet's wife, a grotesque, unsympathetic harpy, a missed
opportunity. While she is meant as comedic, her status as the only biologically
female character of any significance and the unique absence of her development
in a book otherwise so psychologically acute suggest the same misogynistic blindspot
marring the work of male authors from Alasdair Gray to Hergé. Whether
this refusal to substantively engage the psyche of female characters stems from
literary insecurity, laziness, or lack of curiosity, it's a shame. In My
Tender Matador, the obviation threatens to reduce an otherwise grounded
human novel to a myopic boys-only fantasy land, a riff on Genet. Whatever a
writer's views, willfully or unintentionally eliding the interior life of women
from a novel in which they appear is an unambiguous authorial failure.

My Tender Matador may not be flawless, but it is still an unforgettable
achievement, a literary colossus. The whims of popular readership and the nitpicks
of critics merely break like tide upon its pedicured toenails.